From A Field Guide to Etowah County

From A Field Guide to Etowah County

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From A Field Guide to Etowah County

Bluets, larkspur, common violets in the jimson and queen-anne's-lace, tangles of boxwood and honeysuckle and smilax in hydrangea and pine, thick from which Spring Azures drift, among the first to emerge, the Swallowtails' gunmetal iridescence, obsidian-with-stars wings turning like pages in hands of wind. Thrashers tear in the leaves for earthworms, salamanders, some morsel, their stipple of sunlight-in-leaves blending then reappearing in a crash of meal. If a snake uncurls, the bird will leaf it in bibles of territory, protection, and someone's aunt or grandmother, passing, will slow to note that summer is on us early. But this one merely stands, its wing in a ray, feathers a concrete mottle of grain and pebble like a roadside table turned into brush long ago. Here, there is no cankered plum or split persimmon, sap or juice to bead, mimeograph bright, on the grass's nibs, and the grass does not whorl in cursives of moonlight and dark each night, but this is where they found that postman from Baltimore, walking his integration letter to Ross Barnett, three hundred miles to go, shot in his head and neck, copies of the protest scattered and streaking in the April dew. It was September, honeysuckle in full perfume, the woods a riot of grackles and jays, when the grand jury broke and let the suspect go. The facts are simple, my grandfather said, the D.A. said we couldn't make a case, so the words they never wrote coiled in field reports and requisitions, and three days later a church-bomb in Birmingham blew the stained-glass face of Christ like a dandelion head in the roadside weeds. Snakeroot, aster, and blazing star, some toxic to cows, should not be eaten, though many take the greens and fruit of poke, more abundant in Spring, as correctives, small poisons to set things right. Goldenrod blazes the highway's shoulders, all the way to Birmingham or Chattanooga, and starlings gather like glass, like grackles in the trees, such sociability an advance of colder weather. The Swallowtails and Azures have disappeared, but you may spot the Great Purple Hairstreak bumbling, slow and easy to observe, even in the clouds of goldenrod that dust when they land. The cones are brilliant but delicate as their gossamer wings. Touch, and the color's written in your skin.

Published in Murder Ballads (2005). Text may vary slightly from the video reading.